Don't Let Setbacks Spiral

I have not had much motivation to write these posts lately. It pretty much corresponds to when my hard drive crashed. Without going into too much detail, my primary hard drive was wiped out and my back-up hard drive crashed, so I kind of lost everything.

Fortunately, my very old files (things from college and before) were saved on an external hard drive, and I had coincidentally emailed basically all of my story ideas and drafts not terribly long ago, so not all is lost here.

Not everything is as it was, though. First of all, one of the documents I do not have anymore is my list of blog post ideas. I know there were a lot of things I wanted to do with them, and they are all gone. Sure, there is always more I can say. And sure, I am used to ideas coming and going just because I didn't write them down in the first place. But this is psychological. And the psychological damage has been done.

When I get ready to write a post, my habit is to open up the idea list, and now I don't have one. It makes me depressed. It makes me uninspired. It makes me want to go on vacation until I'm not uninspired.

But that is literally the worst thing I could do. When you have a setback, it is exactly that. It sets you back. It does not permanently destroy you. So don't act like it does. If one bad thing happens to you, don't let it become a downward spiral of depression. Chill out, take a deep breath, maybe a hot shower, and write one thing.

It doesn't have to be the best thing ever. It doesn't even have to be great. It just has to be written. It's the only surefire way to end the cycle.